In tactical shift, US announces intent to ‘annihilate’ ISIS

Freer hand. US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Marine Corps General Joseph F. Dunford (R), US Secretary of Defence James Mattis (C) and Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIS Brett McGurk (L) answer questions during a Pe

London - The Trump administration has announced its inten­tion to “annihilate” the forces of the Islamic State (ISIS) in what is described as a tactical shift in the campaign to oust the jihadists from their shrink­ing territory in Iraq and Syria. US Defence Secretary James Mat­tis revealed the new policy in mid- May and spelled it out again ten days later after the Pentagon admit­ted that more than 100 civilians had died in a US air strike on Mosul in March. Mattis said such casualties were “a fact of life” in such conflicts, which will be no consolation to the thousands trapped in the Iraqi city between its ISIS occupiers and ad­vancing Iraqi government forces. In his formal presentation of the new strategy on May 19, Mattis said US President Donald Trump had ordered an accelerated campaign against ISIS that would include a shift in existing tactics. He inevitably raised the question of whether the White House was planning to escalate US involve­ment in the conflict and what the consequences of such action might be. First, Mattis said, the military hi­erarchy would be given a freer hand in conducting the campaign. That implied a relaxation of the tight ex­ecutive control of anti-ISIS opera­tions exercised by the Obama White House. Second, he revealed, the United States would seek to annihilate ISIS by surrounding and killing its forc­es rather than simply chasing them out of territory they control. The expressed rationale for wip­ing out the jihadists was to prevent the foreign fighters among them es­caping the battlefield and returning to their home countries to carry out attacks. The US defence secretary elabo­rated on the strategy at the end of May when he told CBS News’ pro­gramme “Face the Nation”: “Our intention is that the foreign fighters do not survive the fight to return home to North Africa, to Europe, to America, to Asia, to Africa. “We’re not going to allow them to do so,” Mattis said. “We’re going to stop them there and take apart the caliphate.” Those comments came days after a suicide bomber killed 22 people at a concert hall in Manchester, Eng­land. The bomber was identified as a man born in Britain to Libyan par­ents and whom British authorities said may have been in Syria at some stage. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack. None of the United States’ al­lies in the Middle East and beyond would disagree with the ultimate objective of removing the ISIS scourge but some are resistant to being bulldozed into backing the accelerated and more aggressive strategy emanating from the Trump administration. Ahead of a NATO summit attend­ed by Trump in late May, several European countries were reported to be sceptical about bowing to the US president’s demands that the 28-member alliance should formal­ly enter the international coalition against ISIS. Member countries are individu­ally part of the coalition but France and Germany were among those said to be reluctant to see opera­tions in Syria and Iraq turning into a NATO war. The Brussels summit agreed that NATO would become a full mem­ber of the international coalition, although that announcement was somewhat eclipsed by Trump’s ha­rangue of fellow members for not spending enough on defence. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg stressed that joining the coalition did not mean that the alliance would engage in combat against ISIS. He emphasised NATO support in terms of aerial surveillance, infor­mation sharing, intelligence and training of Iraqi troops, thereby as­suaging concerns of alliance mem­bers about being dragged deeper into the conflict by a newly aggres­sive White House. Although the United States’ al­lies have had to confront the chal­lenges of dealing with a new presi­dent who has proved capricious on many foreign policy issues, the new Washington strategy does not auto­matically signal a major escalation in the scale of the anti-ISIS cam­paign or the resources dedicated to it.It was unveiled after the US Con­gress said it would hold up billions of dollars of supplementary mili­tary spending unless the admin­istration provided it with a formal strategy to defeat ISIS. Shortly before the strategy was delivered, Mattis said the admin­istration planned to focus on de­feating ISIS without getting more deeply involved in Syria’s civil war. Despite an increase in the small number of US and allied soldiers on the ground, the war in both Iraq and Syria is likely to continue to be fought overwhelmingly by local forces. And, despite the more aggressive rhetoric coming out of the White House and the Pentagon, even “Mad Dog” Mattis — he earned the nickname as a US Marine Corps general — has been cautious about predicting that the new strategy will bring a speedy end to ISIS. He said on “Face the Nation” it would be “a long fight” and would involve not only beating the group on the ground in Iraq and Syria but also defeating what he called the “virtual caliphate” existing on the internet.